


dead before the day is done

by sparxwrites



Category: The Yogscast
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Burns, Discussions of sex, Gore, Hallucinations, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Dubious Consent, Loss of Control, M/M, Mental Breakdown, Mental Instability, Murder, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-10
Updated: 2016-02-10
Packaged: 2018-05-18 22:25:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5945458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sparxwrites/pseuds/sparxwrites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You killed me,” says Parvis, idly. Blood rattles in his throat, laces his voice with an edge of rotting death. Every word comes out <i>damp</i>, hissing, spattered crimson and choking, like it’s an effort to force them out of dead lungs. “You do know that, right, Strifey?”</p><p>(It was inevitable, really, that someone would have to take Parvis down eventually. Strife is the one to do it, and pays the price for it. Who would have thought that Parvis would be even mouther <i>after</i> he was dead?)</p>
            </blockquote>





	dead before the day is done

**Author's Note:**

> i saw [this piece of art](http://mindfulwrath.tumblr.com/post/138773036458/zeroafterdark-martyr) and immediately thought of parvis, and then bad things happened. wh oops. title is from "seven devils" by florence + the machine. please mind the warnings on this one.

“You killed me,” says Parvis, idly. Blood rattles in his throat, laces his voice with an edge of rotting death. Every word comes out _damp_ , hissing, spattered crimson and choking, like it’s an effort to force them out of dead lungs. “You do know that, right, Strifey?”

It makes Strife’s skin crawl. He doesn’t dare turn around.

“Shut up,” he snaps, voice rough, hands shaking. It’s not an ideal state to be soldering delicate circuitry in, but it’s not like there’s anything else to do that’ll keep his mind occupied. He’s not eaten in forty-eight hours, not slept in far longer if he doesn’t count the periods of blackness and lost time like someone’s taken a bite out of his memories – and he doesn’t count them.

There’s several empty coffee cups on his desk, even the grainy dregs drained, collecting flies, and a half-drunk bottle of vodka. He’d opened _that_ after all the whiskey had run out, one empty bottle in the trash and the other glittering glass shards on the floor after he’d hurled it at the wall.

He’s not started on the redstone yet, doesn’t want to risk it making the damned hallucinations _worse_. But, when the alcohol runs out… His mind wanders, absently, to the glittering bag of it sitting in his bedside table three floors below, and he idly considers whether he’d be able to get to it before he blacked out, or vomited. Or both.

Parvis hums, thoughtfully. “But you did, though,” he says, as if they’re holding a pleasant conversation about the weather – as if he isn’t dead, and Strife isn’t slowly killing himself in his own sweet way. “I mean, besides _actually_ killing me- which you also did, remember, Strife, remember how you-”

Gasping in a breath like he’s drowning, Strife shakes his head. “Shut _up_.” The movement makes the world spin, his head ring.

His hand gives a particularly sharp jerk. The soldering iron slips, burns an oval onto his skin just below the webbing between his thumb and forefinger. Parvis laughs, a high, cruel, _wet_ sound.

“That’s why you should wear protective gloves, Strifey,” he says, unconcerned, as Strife swears and drops the soldering iron and brings the burn, automatically, up to his mouth. “But, back to me! Because I’m the important one here. The one you _killed_. You let me start blood magic, Strife, didn’t you? You _know_ what it does, don’t you, but you still let me. _Helped_ me, even, bled for me so _easily_ , let me bleed too-”

“What was I supposed to do?” he asks – knows he’s lost the moment Parvis crows with delight, but can’t find it in himself to care. “I told you to stop, I _told_ you- but you wouldn’t listen. What was I supposed to _do_? You’re- you were an adult, Parvis, you made your choices, you wouldn’t _listen_ \- What was I- try and keep you away from it? Hah! Lock you up? Throw you in some… some _cell_ to keep you safe?!”

There’s something _awful_ in the way Parvis giggles, dark and creeping and entirely humourless. “Would you have liked that, Strife?” he asks, and there’s that same, devastating note of seduction in his voice that he used and abused so often when he was alive. “Kept me in a pretty little cage, all to yourself? You could have done it, you know, at the beginning… I was weak, wasn’t I? Poor, _pitiful_ Parvy-Parv wouldn’t have been able to stop you. I’d have been _all yours_. You wouldn’t have had to share me, no one else could have touched me- _Ridgedog_ couldn’t have touched me…”

“ _Shut up_ ,” repeats Strife, but this time the words come out like a moan. He drops his head into one hand, headache flaring and stomach roiling. There’s bile at the back of his mouth, sour on his tongue.

“Did I ever tell you _how_ he touched me?” continues Parvis. Strife doesn’t need to look to see the wicked grin on his face. It’s more than audible in his voice, the wicked dip and rise of it. “Because _oh_ , Strife. How he _touched_ me. You’d’ve killed him, if you’d know, prob’ly – I saw how you looked at him when he so much as put a hand on my _shoulder_. But the places those hands went… _well_ …”

Strife grabs for the vodka at that point, because to hell with it, to _hell_ with it, he’s not sitting here and listening to this. If nothing else, it’ll knock him out, shut Parvis _up_ for a little bit. Who’d have thought he’d be even mouthier after dying?

His hand doesn’t close around the neck of the bottle in his frantic, blind groping, though, but the discarded, still-hot soldering iron. It burns a straight line across his palm, the smell of scorched flesh filling the room as Parvis _cackles_. He doesn’t scream, refuses to let anything other than a high, thin, _animal_ noise of pain escape through clenched teeth.

“He fucked my throat, first,” says Parvis, when he's calmed down enough to form words. They rattle in his chest, sick and gurgling. “Fingers, then his cock- oh, he was so _big_ , Strife, filled me up just like you never could. I kept gagging, you know, and he just _loved_ that. Hands in my hair, choking me… I nearly threw up when he finally let me go.” He says it casually, conversationally, as if Strife isn’t flinching with every word.

The cool glass of the bottle feels good against his burnt palm, when he finally grabs it – doesn’t even need to unscrew the lid, had left it open after the last binge – and he downs half of what’s left in three long, greedy gulps. Parvis laughs and laughs, and he can't find it in himself to care.

“When he fucked me, Strife, I _screamed_.” Parvis sounds as if he’s relishing Strife’s every shudder, delighting in his every twitch. “If you’d still been there, you would have heard it – I was so _loud_ , Strife. He didn’t open me up properly, you see, just two fingers and spit. I felt every. Goddamn. Inch. Did I mention how big he was, Strife? So much bigger than you.”

Again, Strife flinches, and again, Parvis laughs. “He made me _beg_ ,” he says, spitting the words out like knives, and Strife’s no longer sure whether Parvis wants to make him jealous or wants an apology. “And then he fucked me, until I couldn’t tell what I was begging for any more. Bent me over the blood altar and shoved his dick into me until my knees gave out. He wasn’t at _all_ like you, Strife.”

Parvis pauses, voice softening a little. “You were always so gentle with me, Strife, weren’t you? You could _never_ make me scream, even out of your mind on redstone. You always touched me like I was something _fragile_.” The words sound like an accusation. “What, Strifey- did you think you were going to _break_ me if you held too tight?”

Choking on a sob, Strife’s fingers white-knuckle around the neck of the bottle, and he shakes his head. “No,” he gasps, biting down on his lower lip to try and stop the ache in his chest, the nauseous clench of his stomach. “No, it wasn’t like that-”

“Wonder what it says about you, that you only ever fucked me when you were drunk or high,” says Parvis, quietly. The words ring in Strife’s ears as if he’d screamed them. “…Wonder what it says about _me_ , that I _let_ you.”

Strife’s not sure when he started crying, but he is, cold tears trickling down his cheeks from squeezed-shut eyes. They drip off his chin, fall fat and damp onto his lap, soaking dark circles into the creased fabric of his trousers.

“I don’t- _god_ ,” he whispers, the back of his hand pressed against his mouth, words slurring. He takes another sip of the vodka, then another, ignoring the way it makes his stomach roil unpleasantly. “You think I care about him right now, Parvis? About _him_?” He shakes his head, the world blurring in front of his eyes, puts the bottle to his lip and upends it until it runs dry. “God. _God_.”

“Look at me, Strife.”

There’s something oddly gentle, oddly kind in his voice. That, more than anything, is what makes Strife turn around with a churning stomach and a screech of chair legs on flagstone floor. He knows what he’ll see, knows _exactly_ what’s waiting for him, but he looks anyways. Parvis is right – Strife had killed him. He owes Parvis this much, at least.

Parvis looks much the same in death as he did in life. A dark shock of hair atop his head, a wide smile, glittering eyes. Vampire-pale skin, too-sharp teeth, blood smeared down his t-shirt in drying streaks. There’s a damp splatter of it across his cheek, shockingly dark and scarlet against the white of his face, more dripping from the corner of his mouth. Even as Strife watches, his tongue darts up to lap it up, leaving a pale smear in its wake.

He could almost be _alive_ , if… if it weren’t for his throat.

(Two arrows, through the narrow gap between his chestplate and his helmet. One to take him down, another to make sure, and Strife had knelt by him as he bled out slowly, tugging the fleshy armour off him with his nails and cradling his head, sobbing, _sobbing_ -)

“My throat’s a little _occupied_ right now,” purrs Parvis, flashing a sleazy grin in Strife’s direction. His teeth are stained scarlet and black with his own thick, clotting blood – but his eyes are just as bright as they were before, crimson and so _alive_ it’s hard to believe he isn’t. “But I reckon I could still manage to suck you off.”

“ _God_ ,” breathes Strife, transfixed in something between horror and fascination. Even like this, bloodied and mocking and _dead_ , Parvis is beautiful.

Parvis grins, opens his mouth wide, wide, and pushes two fingers inside. He drools bloody saliva around them, slips them in far enough that they nudge the shafts of the arrows through his throat and make the tips of them twitch and shiver with every movement of his mouth, jaw and throat working around the intrusion. “C’mon, Strife,” he rasps, pulling them out dripping-slick and filthy and crooking them in Strife’s direction. “Come and get it.”

“Why are you _doing_ this?” moans Strife, wraps his lips around the bottle of vodka again and upends it – only to whimper when there’s nothing left. His fingers white-knuckle around the neck of the bottle, trembling. “What do you _want_ from me, god, what- _what_ -”

Parvis smiles again, and _keeps_ smiling, wider and wider until the expression is all manic, furious light in his eyes and a baring of bloodstained teeth. “You killed me, Strife,” he says, as if it’s oh-so-simple. As if that’s all there is to it. “I’m dead, and _you’re still alive_. And I want you to _suffer_ for it.”

The bottle’s soaring through the air before Strife even realises he’s thrown it. It misses Parvis by a meter, shatters against the wall with a too-loud crash, and Parvis _laughs_. It’s an awful sound, cold and hollow and echoing, empty of anything other than an inhuman rage and cruelty.

“Fuck this,” slurs Strife, stomach clenching unpleasantly in as close to fear as he can manage like this, black-out drunk and caffeine-wired and shaking. His hand is throbbing in time to his heartbeat, his head too. “Fuck this, fuck _you_ -”

“I’m dead, Strife!” laughs Parvis – and the further he worms his way under Strife’s skin, the more _alive_ he looks, animated and delighted and so painfully _real_. It’s hard to remember he’s not really there. “You killed me, remember? You can’t fuck me ever again, and it’s _your own fault_ -”

Strife lurches to his feet without thinking, propelled by grief and guilt and fury, and drops like a stone.

He scrapes his palms against the stone floor as he catches himself on hands and knees, grazes them bloody, another injury to add to the burns already littering them. “You think-” he gasps out, the words difficult to form on his alcohol-numb tongue. The world spins around him, dizzying and sickening and tinged black at the edges. “You fucking _think_ \- think I _care_ about that-”

“No,” says Parvis, honestly, and all hint of teasing gone. There’s cold malice in its place, a flat fury that makes Strife claw his fingers against the stone and _tremble_. “No, I don’t _think_ , William, because I’m _dead_. You. Killed. Me! I can’t think _anything_ , I’ll never think again, and it’s _all. Your. FAULT!_ ”

Strife sobs, quietly, shoulders heaving with the effort of it. “I didn’t-” he whispers. “It wasn’t- someone had to. Someone had to. I… I wanted it to be _me_.” Didn’t want it to be one of the others, he thinks, but doesn’t say. You deserved someone to hold you as you died.

“So no,” says Parvis, quietly, ignoring him. “I don’t _think_. But you do, don’t you? Oh, Strife, you _think_ , you think so much it _hurts_. All the things you could have done, all the things you should have said… It eats away at you, doesn’t it? Like _worms_. You’re almost as dead as me! All eaten up from the inside by your own guilt, hollowed out… It just _kills_ you to think that the thing you miss most about me might just be having something warm to fuck when you feel lonely at night.” He grins – not that Strife can see, eyes on the floor and vision almost gone. “And, like I said, Strifey – you _deserve_ to _suffer_.”

“I’m sorry,” whispers Strife, the darkness closing in. “I didn’t- I’m _sorry_ -”

His arms give way, and the floor rushes up to meet him. Strife’s last conscious thought – past Parvis’ silent judgement, past his roiling stomach, past the guilt so heavy on his shoulders he can hardly breathe with the way it’s crushing his ribs – is a vague hope that he chokes on his own vomit in his sleep. He doesn’t want to wake up.


End file.
